Success versus failure

The last couple of weeks have been exceptionally crazy, who am I kidding the last couple of years have really been crazy but recently it feels like the craziness has been taken to a whole new level. Between juggling the kids and the house and working three jobs (though all part time), between trying to manage contractors as we attempt to build a bigger house, between the everyday bits and pieces that pop up and demand my attention I feel like I am dropping more balls than I have in the air right now.

The house is just gross. It just is. You can physically stick to my kitchen floor at the moment and there are at least four spots where you run the risk of loosing a shoe. For real. There are piles of "project stuff" everywhere which Mehran repeatedly points out to me and pointedly asks when they might be moving. I wish I knew. The kids are struggling to get their jobs done each night and I am struggling on follow through. The decorations that I had planned to have up leading to the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Baha'u'llah are only partially up and by partially I mean only 6 little triangles are stuck to the wall. I can barely keep with helping with homework and additional learning goals for the kids and by barely I mean not at all. We haven't had a proper- family- sit- down- dinner all together in over a month. I am on the go from morning till night and still nothing feels like it gets done. And I am tired. So, so , so tired. Abdu'l-Baha stressed the importance of cleanliness and order and I am epicly failing in both departments right now. Sometimes it feels like all people see are the failures, the bits that are not done, that are not clean or that are incomplete. They do not see the struggle, how hard you have tried to achieve just one thing in the midst of all the chaos. But I am trying to see that. To see the one good thing in the midst of all the bad and to help the kids to see it too. Not only for themselves but also for each other. I came across a wonderful quote I had not read in ages: 
"...Thus is it incumbent upon us, when we direct our gaze toward
other people, to see where they excel, not where they fail." ~Abdu'l-Baha

Lord knows we need to focus on that around here but I think that we need to use that on ourselves as well, to look at what we have managed to achieve and not focus on what we have failed to do, to give ourselves a bit of grace and mercy even when the floors are gross and people are picking on each other. For now I am off to fill in forms and visa applications for Ruhi who has just been accepted into a study abroad program and who will spend the next year over in Japan. More on that later.